Part 2 of My Conversation with Nationwide MG’s CI Division
Note to Reader: This post is the second part of a two-part series. In Part One, each of the directors of the three operating buying groups in Nationwide’s CI Division shared the details of their individual and group progress in 2024. You will want to read – or reread – that post first, as it helps Part Two make more sense.
Nationwide Marketing Group’s Custom Integration (CI) division made serious progress in 2024 as part of the organization’s ambitious Drive to 1,000 plan – seeking to build a collective CI membership of 1,000 dealers strong. In my previous post, the executives instrumental in achieving that progress – Andy Orozco (Nationwide’s Senior Vice President of Custom Integration), Patrick McCarthy (Executive Director, Azione Unlimited), Hank Alexander (Executive Director, Oasys Residential Technology Group), and Chris Whitley (Executive Director, Ellipsys Commercial Technology Group) – shared the highs and lows of building a business the likes of which we’ve never before seen. Now they share their plans for 2025…
See more on NMG CI Division plans for 2025
On a recent group Team’s call last month, after we had concluded our discussion on the progress attained in 2024, I asked the executives to share with me just what they expected 2025 to be like, what their plans were going forward, and if there were any adjustments to the initial plan based on their experience building the organization in 2024.
Patrick McCarthy/Azione Unlimited – Elevated Inner-Group Communication & Nurturing
Patrick McCarthy suggested that he is still early in the current nurturing phase of Azione Unlimited, a process that started in 2024 and remains a continuing priority. At the group’s national events, where everyone is together in the same place and participating in the same events, it’s easy to see a strong sense of community, but once the event is over and everyone returns to their local markets, it’s more of a challenge to keep that sense of community strong and interactive. Yet to attain that next level of productivity, McCarthy believes nurturing that sense of community and best practices sharing is critical.
“So in 2025, if we did our job correctly, of the things that we’ll grow on, one is a better community communication, which is sort of a long way of saying we’re going to blow up our Slack,” McCarthy said. “We’re going to expand on our network. And because we’re in a nurture mode, and we think we have a lot of good dealers, why not get them communicating with each other? We will ideally follow up that with some sort of mentorship program. We think that there’s a lot of knowledge from people who have had businesses go into very mature states, and they want to keep sharing those ideas.”
We think Azione is made up of dealers who are set up to handle million-dollar jobs as a benchmark…
Patrick McCarthy, Executive Director of Azione Unlimited
The Immense Power of Shared Experiences
When McCarthy talks about expanding on the Azione network, he’s not referring to adding more members, he’s talking about increasing the level of in-group interactive communications between the members. The Executive Director said management came to recognize the value of this member-to-member sharing as a result of topical symposiums the group has created to pull together smaller groups of mid-level folks from members.
“We think Azione is made up of dealers who are set up to handle million-dollar jobs as a benchmark,” McCarthy explained. “I heard from Andrew Ward at a CEDIA senior-level class that 50% of dealers who take on their first million-dollar job go out of business.”
Million Dollar Jobs ‘R Us
Those kind of big $1, 2, 3 million dollar jobs have unique issues and can quickly become a cashflow quagmire, he told me. But Azione dealers have a tremendous amount of experience with all the complexity that caliber of system installation encompasses, which is a tremendous resource for those growing Azione members looking to make the leap.
“We’re set up to do that [million dollar projects],” the Azione Executive Director said. “[In Azione] you have the project managers and system designers, and you have relationships with the right vendors, so they understand how you operate.”
The Greatest Thing About Being Part of Nationwide
“The greatest benefit of being part of a parent company like Nationwide is that it is launching a comprehensive LMS (learning management system),” McCarthy said enthusiastically. “So each of the groups will get a crack at that. We’ll all have pages.
“And our members are telling us, ‘Give us technical training. Give us HR playbooks that our people can sit through,’ McCarthy added. ‘Give us all the ‘Why OLED is the best technology’ type of evergreen content.’ No one needs another ‘Here’s the new model, and here’s why it’s great,’ kind of education.
“So we can put resources together, bring coaches in, share those resources between all three groups, and have a lot of amazing evergreen education,” McCarthy enthused. “Evergreen education that we can make because Nationwide has a recording facility in Marietta, and we have an LMS that’s available to all Nationwide groups.”
No single group is likely to have the level of resources necessary to afford a benefit like that for their members. And that fact – the Nationwide scale – is a real edge over the competition.
Hank Alexander/Oasys – Keeping the Foot on the Accelerator
Hank Alexander says his first priority for Oasys in 2025 is to keep the growth going. Actually, he expects it to accelerate. In 2024, Oasys added a total of 72 new members to the organization. In 2025, he tells me that they’ll add “roughly” another 100 members or so, which should take the total group membership to around 425 or 430 dealers.
Another key 2025 goal for him is to work on increasing the adoption of Oasys brands amongst the membership. This is probably extra difficult for him as the group is growing so rapidly and new members come with a patchwork of brands they support, many of which are likely not group brands. So how do you attack that?
“It’s a process of education,” Alexander tells me.
Equally Enthusiastic About Nationwide’s Turbocharged Education System
And speaking of education, Alexander is equally enthusiastic about the added edge that its significant parent company affords him.
“Whether you’re a six million dollar company or a million dollar company, education is a big part of your needs,” Alexander told me. “And Patrick’s right, we’ve got this great back end with Nationwide and the LMS. We’re bringing some certification classes over from a lighting partner that’s got a great certification program that they’re now launching…as well as adding the CEDIA Academy…and all of those kinds of things.
“So education,” Alexander summed up, “is a big part of what we’re doing, and a big growth strategy for us.”
So we’re being very strategic [in the vendor selection process]…and very supportive of our vendors
Hank Alexander, Executive Director of Oasys Residential Technology Group
Finally, with 76 brands from 57 vendors already in the group’s official assortment, the Oasys Executive Director says he’s getting more strategic with new vendor additions. Currently, he’s primarily looking to broaden just his lighting and shading categories. Alexander understands he needs to offer Oasys members a big assortment of the best brands, but as an ex-manufacturer himself, he appreciates the vendor’s need for full support from the group’s members.
“So we’re being very strategic [in the vendor selection process] and very supportive of our vendors,” Alexander said.
Chris Whitley/Ellipsys – We’re Still a Startup, So We’ve Got To Focus on Everything
In our discussion of the gains made in 2024, I had teased Chris Whitley who – as the only new group in Nationwide – had a 100% rate of growth in its membership with 20 new commercial dealers joining the organization. Of course, it would have been 100% growth if only 1 dealer had joined because the group didn’t exist in 2023.
Now in our discussion of 2025, he teased me back saying he was targeting another 100% rate of growth for 2025. The joke, of course, is because as a newcomer, they are starting from a relatively small base. Whitley says he is targeting a total membership of between 45-to-50 dealers by the end of 2025.
While that may sound like a lot of stuff, we’re still a startup…so we’ve got to focus on everything!
Chris Whitley, Executive Director of Ellipsys Commercial Technology Group
Seeking New Vendors in Targeted Product Segments
Whitley noted that in addition to member growth, he was also looking to add more vendors. However, like Alexander, Whitley says his vendor additions are in select targeted areas.
“Our new vendor additions will be focused around managed services, digital signage, and command and control centers,” Whitley said. “So we will target some really focused areas that we want to work on to better serve our members.”
Tapping the Power of Nationwide
“The third piece is to tap the power of Nationwide,” Whitley told me. “We will be continuing to develop our infrastructure for our members, where we’ll get to leverage things like Nationwide’s new LMS education system, a lot of their business services, as well as their portal. So we’ll be integrating all of that into the Ellipsys operations with a heavy focus on education.”
Whitley added: “We’ll also have advisory boards within our group that will advise similar to the other groups. And finally, we’ll be utilizing the Nationwide platform to bring some of the services from the parent organization to those members as well.”
“While that may sound like a lot of stuff,” Whitley concluded, “we’re still a startup…so we’ve got to focus on everything!”
Andy Orozco/Nationwide MG – Three Priorities, Two That Break New Ground
Andy Orozco – Nationwide’s head of the CI group – told me that for 2025 he has three major projects in the works. First, is a project centered on group-generated data and a plan to provide visibility to this valuable data to group vendors. Second, he says he will be working hard to enable the guys (McCarthy, Alexander, and Whitley) to run their businesses properly and hit their targets. And third, he is working on a project to enable cross-group cooperation and help drive new opportunities for growth.
“I think data is big,” Orozco said. “So utilizing data to give our vendors insight into the potential in our group and pipeline I think tremendously increases our value to them. It makes our relationship with them better.”
Opening Up Vendor Access to Group Data
A big organization like Nationwide generates a lot of data. For this reason, it has created a special Business Intelligence unit that compiles and analyses this data and creates special reports which it offers to various internal and even external stakeholders. This data could be accessed in multiple ways, such as via custom-created dashboards.
[U]tilizing data to give our vendors insight into the potential in our group and pipeline I think tremendously increases our value to them.
Andy Orozco, Nationwide Senior Vice President of Custom Integration
Orozco and Nationwide are looking at ways to provide access for group vendors to this data, enabling both sides of the relationship to perceive trends and maximize the partnership. Such transparency is rare in the buying group world, but Nationwide already offers some of these capabilities in its retail group businesses.
Running Interference: Keeping Operating Managers Focused on Operations
In his second goal, Orozco notes that large groups like Nationwide can unintentionally offer extra challenges for their various operating group managers. He confronts this challenge by inserting himself in the process to take the extraordinary intermediary steps necessary to keep the needs of the CI group at the front of the line for the parent company’s resources.
“There are a lot of resources that the guys have talked about today that are inside of Nationwide,” Orozco noted. “But we’re not the only business unit inside of the organization that wants access to those things. So if I can somehow cut in line, or just stay top of mind internally, then I think that helps Patrick, Andy, and Chris to stay focused on running their businesses and hitting their targets.”
Uncovering New Business Opportunities
Finally, Orozco told me that under the Nationwide umbrella are other buying groups that – though they are in different channels – serve the same customers as the CI group. For example, there is a group in Nationwide that supplies flooring/roofing/kitchen cabinetry that Orozco says “touches 25% of all new construction in the United States.” He is studying ways to have cross-group cooperation between that group and his CI groups which creates new opportunities for both of the partners.
“I think there’s a lot of potential there to share programs and tie our dealers together,” Orozco told me.
It is this type of outside-of-the-box thinking that distinguishes Nationwide from other organizations. Successful organizations operate like this – always looking for new ways to create new opportunities and unlock hidden value by imagining a completely different approach that is within the capability of your resources. This kind of innovative thinking generated the Drive to 1,000 program…and it certainly looks like more innovation is just on the horizon.
For More Information…
To learn more about Nationwide Marketing Group, visit nationwidegroup.org.
Find out what Chris Whitley has going on at Ellipsys Commercial Technology Group here at ellipsysgroup.org.
See all that Hank Alexander is doing at the Oasys Residential Technology Group at oasysgroup.org.
Follow Patrik McCarthy and the whole crew at Azione Unlimited at azioneunlimited.com.
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